TARGETING AND CLASSIFYING CONFIDENTIAL DATA
Industry research proves that the volume of data stored in businesses is growing dramatically.
In this Web 2.0 world, trade secrets, customer lists, credit card data, employee records and more have created a burgeoning demand for tools to discover and classify confidential and sensitive data - data often sitting on servers, PCs and other devices that create a serious data protection risk to businesses.
To help businesses solve this critical business issue, Websense has introduced new data discovery software designed to help businesses automatically identify and understand where confidential information resides throughout their organization.
Websense Senior Vice President of Product Development John McCormack explains why data discovery is a critical component of data security.
Q&A with John McCormack
February 2008
Q: Data discovery seems to be businesses' first step in comprehensive data loss prevention. Why is data discovery and classification so critical?
A: Businesses are overwhelmed with the large task of discovering proprietary and confidential data within their networks and between their business partners. The amount of information stored throughout an organization is exponentially growing and puts pressure on Chief Security Officers (CSOs) and their staff to understand where sensitive data resides. Without knowing this, they often don't understand how critical comprehensive data loss prevention is to protect their budgets, their businesses and their brands.
Q: What should happen after businesses discover and classify their confidential data?
A: Once businesses discover where sensitive data exists, they can then decide whether to implement a full data loss prevention (DLP) solution that includes monitoring of data in motion and data protection enforcement policies so they can control where it's going and who is sending it there. Data discovery is the first step in DLP, which is why the increasing volume of data at rest in organizations is helping drive DLP adoption.
Q: How does Websense discover and classify confidential information?
A: Data loss prevention solutions need to analyze an immense amount of information in real-time to decide whether content is similar to one of the millions of pieces data businesses identified as confidential. When you stop to think about how much data is in motion in organizations today (through Web and Web 2.0 collaboration systems, e-mail, instant messaging, printing, and other channels), this real-time analysis can be a demanding task.
To accomplish this, Websense pioneered advanced fingerprinting technology based on our unique PreciseID™ technology, and uses it in our discovery capabilities. Just like how a person's fingerprints are each unique, PreciseID uses mathematical algorithms to create multiple unique fingerprints per data file. Once it is fingerprinted, the data can be monitored no matter how it is manipulated, changed or moved.
Q: Is fingerprinting the only discovery technology used in data loss prevention?
A: Fingerprinting is not always applicable - but Websense has that covered. In many cases, data loss prevention solutions must also identify what exactly the content is, even without comparing it to fingerprinted data, in real-time. Websense leads the DLP market by providing contextual analysis of even non-fingerprinted data through advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology. Our NLP technology gives our software the power to understand the context around the data to accurately identify both structured data (such as social security numbers and credit card numbers) and unstructured data (such as marketing plans, proprietary formulas and other types of intellectual property). It can then help businesses more intelligently create protection policies. Pre-defined policy templates can be used to help enforce local data privacy laws or specific regulations in that industry, or the organization can develop their own unique policies to meet their needs.
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